Ubuntu and acpi=off

I have a question for the linux experts... I have an Asus laptop with Intel graphics, and when I run Ubuntu 11.10, my display brightness can't be adjusted. I can change the slider, but it does nothing. The display brightness is fixed at about half bright, and I want it brighter. I found that if I boot with 'acpi=off' then the brightness slider DOES work, and everything is peachy...

My question is, if I make that permanent change to my /etc/default/grub file (acpi=off), then what else might be or is affected by this setting. I'm hoping there are no other ill side-effects from doing this, but I have no idea what's going on or what it is really doing when I make that change. Am I likely to lose other functionality of any kind? Or break anything?

Hey Linuxforall. I was hoping you might have some ideas. That's great, thanks. I will give that a go.

Click to expand...

Welcome, will wait for your feedback, currently I have it installed on my ASUS eeePC AMD fusion netbook and battery savings are quite improved. In my case I adjust brightness with my AMD applet and it is permanent.

Also to get all the Fn keys working, add acpi_osi=Linux to grub and update grub, make sure 'L' is capital in Linux.

Click to expand...

Thanks Linuxforall... As it turns out, I can actually change and set the brightness using xrandr, which works fine. However, it seems that it's not the brightness that's off after all, but the backlight. Apparently I can use xbacklight to adjust that, but I have to enable universe and install it with sudo apt-get install etc. I might try that later...

Meanwhile I have installed openSUSE 12.1 Gnome and am having some fun. This one works out of the box, as well as the function keys, so I am tempted to stick with this. But I will probably go back to Ubuntu soon and finish what I started. Or maybe wait for 12.04 coming up soon....

Thanks Linuxforall... As it turns out, I can actually change and set the brightness using xrandr, which works fine. However, it seems that it's not the brightness that's off after all, but the backlight. Apparently I can use xbacklight to adjust that, but I have to enable universe and install it with sudo apt-get install etc. I might try that later...

Meanwhile I have installed openSUSE 12.1 Gnome and am having some fun. This one works out of the box, as well as the function keys, so I am tempted to stick with this. But I will probably go back to Ubuntu soon and finish what I started. Or maybe wait for 12.04 coming up soon....

Click to expand...

Hey Kerodo, if you are distro hopping as usual, give Chakra a try, you might like it.